On-chip antennas for 60-GHz radios in silicon technology

The recent advances in 60-GHz radios have called for the parallel development of compact and efficient millimeter-wave antennas. This brief addresses for the first time the design, fabrication, and characterization of on-chip inverted-F and quasi-Yagi antennas for 60-GHz radios. The design was made using the Zeland IE3D software package. The fabrication was realized with the back-end-of-line process of silicon substrates of low resistivity 10 Ω·cm. The characterization was conducted on wafer with Cascade Microtech coplanar probes and an HP8510XF network analyzer. The results show that the inverted-F antenna achieved a minimum return loss of 32 dB and a gain of -19 dBi at 61 GHz; while the quasi-Yagi antenna achieved a minimum return loss of 6.75 dB and a gain of -12.5 dBi at 65 GHz. Good agreement has been observed between the measured and simulated results.